It happened like this...an English family move to France Part 4

• Me on the balcony of Primrose with our daughter

• Tonnay Boutonne, 1991.

We sold the house near Rochefort at the required profit – or close enough to it.  At the eleventh hour the buyer suddenly wanted to pull out, which would have been a disaster for us.  In France the system is so much better than in England, for when you choose a house you put down a deposit of approx. 10%, varying according to the value of the property.  If you pull out you lose that 10% unless there was a condition or clause in the initial contract.   In this case there was no clause, so it would have meant that we picked up the 10%, but that was not what we wanted.  The stress of it was huge.  Het-up phone calls back and forth, wringing of hands ….  We had already paid our 10% for our new house, organized a mortgage for the balance, and were due to complete later that same day.

The French notaire is like a god

The notaire handling the sale was one Mme Drouart.  She was brilliant, a fairly tall and wide woman with a mass of grey frizzy hair.  She was somewhere in her sixties.  Her office was in a narrow street with only the oval brass plaque sticking out of the wall to indicate there was a notaire at all.  I worked with her a lot.  She once told me she wished I was her daughter, and she looked after me during those first months of finding my way in and out of the legal system.  Notaires in France command a high level of respect, and I think that one of the things she liked about me was that I was so English, ie so casual, in my address to her.  I respected her, of course, but I was chummy rather than in awe.  It never dawned on me to be in awe.

Not that I’d have called her by her first name – to this day that just isn’t done.  I recently interpreted for some UK friends who were completing on a house and, to my horror, my English friend called the notaire by her first name.  My friend, of course, thought she was being friendly, but from anybody other than a foreigner who had not long been in France, could speak no French and was clearly not au fait with French good manners, it would have been astoundingly rude.

Mme Drouart had no children of her own and was married to a man considerably older.  She had lived in the same house all her married life, a huge batisse in the centre of a nearby, and she smelt of soap and lavender.  I learnt a lot from her, enjoyed her company, and in all those years she was the only woman I was to work with.  She took me under her wing with a gentle kindness that I very much appreciated though, of course, any sales were French francs for her.   She died three or four years ago and is buried in the village.

Anyway, she swung in to action and somehow managed to persuade the buyers that they did want the house after all.  How she did it I don’t know because the situation went from a very firm “we’re pulling out”, absolutely a dead cert, to buying again.

• The front of the house looked nothing like the back, almost as though there had been two different architects.  We were surrounded by farmland in all directions.  At first I didn’t mind the isolation.

Primrose, a manoir-cum-hunting-lodge.

We called our new house Primrose.  That was just our name for it and I have no idea why we chose it, though my father had had a motor boat of that name when I was a child in the South Pacific.   The house was really called La Petite Jarlee, a small manoir-cum-hunting-lodge perched on an isolated hill near Tonnay Boutonne.  It had a history to it, dating from 1800 or so, and being the hiding place of a WWII collaborator who was eventually murdered there.  We sometimes wondered if it was haunted … it had a kind of “feel” to it – not menacing in any way, but a constant feel that somebody else was there.  I don’t really take any notice of that kind of thing, but several times I thought I could hear a piano being played.  On the top floor there was an entire appartment with a secret door and a double floor so that he couldn’t be heard … the neighbour told us that he hid up there for several years after the war ended as French patriots sought vengeance, some of it brutal.

The property had been built as a hunting lodge, though it wasn’t clear to which Chateau it would have been attached or who the original owners were.  We imagine a hunting lodge as a timber cabin – well, I do anyway – but although this property had no exquisite features apart from fleur-de-lys tiled floors, it had been created with elegance and taste.  What was left of damp old wallpaper and curtaining was of good quality.  The rooms, although not large, were nicely proportioned, with big windows overlooking fields and trees.  Off to one side were the ruins of another building, way too far gone for restoration, though we did half-think of doing a new-build there.  The same neighbour, a farmer whose house was about three miles away, told us the old building had once been a chapel but that didn’t seem likely to us.

We chose the property for several good reasons.  One, it was incredibly cheap, even for those days – about £35 000 for a run-down seven-bedroomed property, five acres of land and unbroken views in all directions.  Two, it had potential – we would do it up and it would be worth considerably more, and also there was a wing to one side that we could make in to a holiday gite to supplement our income.   Three, we were surrounded by all the little isolated fermettes my clients hankered after and I would therefore have less travelling to do.  And last, but not least, it seemed to me at the time to be a little entity in itself, a sort of beacon, somewhere I could hide and lick my wounds.  I had wounds to heal.

• The front of the house when we bought it.

The job.

I remember one client asking me if I worked.  I had driven her and her husband round and round all day, showing them in to properties, explaining the conveyancing system, interpreting as and when required, pointing out features in the town … and she asked me if I worked!  Yes, I said, I do this.  Oh, she replied, I suppose it is a kind of job.  You have no idea, I wanted to say, you have no idea – the hours of driving people like you round and round, listening to whatever you are saying, showing you in and out of houses, all on the off-chance you will buy.

It worked like this, more-or-less in this order:

- I would find several houses for sale, drive over to see them (often quite a long way), take photos, go home and type up details (in itself stunningly tedious once you have done it several times), and then put a couple of ads in places like The Lady and The Telegraph

- in order to do this I had to use up precious funds on petrol, advertising, getting films developped etc., and I had to bear the children in mind. Frequently one of them would come with me; Jake, aged only 3, often came with me.  I decided he was my lucky mascot.

- enquiries would come in by fax or by phone.  Because in those days it was cheaper to phone in the evenings, people invariably phoned at night, just as we settled down to a film, or supper or both.   I would then post the details to the interested party, knowing full well that only 2 or 3 for every 100 would result in a sale

- this had to be done in a roll-on system so that I had a stream of new properties, a stream of new clients and a stream of new ads.  I could never be without clients or without properties.

- the client would usually turn up, but sometimes they’d make an appointment and simply disappear off the face of the earth.  This could be devastating for me because, in order to see them I had usually driven to 2 or 3 different places to pick up keys, phoned around to make the appointments, left Jake with a childminder (who had to be paid, of course) and then driven to wherever we had agreed to meet.  I would wait an hour or so before deciding it was a no-show and I would then have to take the keys back and phone the disappointed vendors who would tell me that les anglais are not serieux.  There were no mobile phones in those days.

• The whole area, for miles in all directions, was rich (or was it riddled?) with buildings for renovation.  This huge old barn was only £3000, with about an acre of land.  I always wore jeans because of the brambles and stinging nettles, and even where there were none, jeans were better for climbing in to lofts, reaching out to close shutters or whatever.

- as and when I had a client who wished to go ahead and buy, I then had to get him or her to sign a Compromis de Vente.  If I could possibly get this done in a notaire’s office that was great, but it was difficult to get a quick appointment and, to coin a phrase, I had to strike while the iron was hot.  It has always amazed me how my clients trusted me and signed in a cafe, or in the car or their hotel.  At that stage they would also have to give me a cheque for 10%, made out to whichever notaire was handling the sale.

- I also had to negotiate a price.  Sometimes the buyer would make such a low offer it was an insult to the vendor.  Either way, the difference between what the vendor was willing to sell for, and what the buyer was willing to pay – that bit was for me, whatever it was.  Sometimes it was a pittance, sometimes it was a lot.

- I then handed the whole thing over to the notaire and theoretically my role should have ended there.  But because my clients could rarely speak French, and the notaire virtually never spoke any English, my role continued, up and down throughout the various stages towards Completion.  I nudged it forwards, keeping the client happy, till I got my commission.

- then Bruce took over, if possible, with the house renovations – which is a different story altogether

- suffice to say it was a job fraught with hassles and stresses.  On the surface it seemed so pleasant to an outsider, but there were so many pitfalls along the way, so many loops to have to jump through, and the vast majority of my clients were selfish and demanding.  They didn’t think so, of course, but they were.  Believe you me, it was a high-stress job.  The competition from local French agents was vicious, truly nasty. Vendors were unreliable, and often enough just would not be available with the key for me to show my client around the house – my client that I had almost always gone to so much trouble to get.   And my commission was frequently the only income for the family.  Many a good sale would fall through simply because of some silly incident, or because of somebody cutting me out … And clients never seemed to understand this was my income, my only income.  They seemed to think that I was some kind of charitable bi-lingual taxi service and would become angry and unpleasant as soon as they realized there was money in it for me – in effect, their money.

• With one of my numerous brothers (far left).  Bruce, Pippa & Jake, my nephew Tim (seated in white T-shirt) with me sitting just behind him.  We called this the bri – or braai, to be more accurate – from braai-vleis, the South African version of a BBQ (literally burnt meat).

And it was a lonely job that I did alone.  Before this I had been a teacher.  I used to go in to school, teach the lessons, go home again.  Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was not, sometimes I had marking to do, sometimes not.  But I got paid to do what I did, and I didn’t lose any pay if my pupils didn’t pass their “A” levels.  There were set books to work through and a fairly standard sequence of lessons and off-shoots of lessons to give. Standard things were provided – a staff room, coffee, colleagues, car park and a back-up system via the Heads of Department.  Now I had to create situations that in turn would create money.  I had to make thin air produce an income.  That is what running your own business is, just that.  There was no back-up system for me, nothing “ready” for me to use.  I knew nothing about price negotiation, documents, legal papers, cadastral plans, building permission, contracts … but I learnt it all very quickly and, rather to my surprise, found that I was not a teacher at all but a business-woman, and a good one at that.  I earned good money, did a great job, but the wear and tear on my nerves took its toll as the years tripped by …

• Jake sitting behind Tim in a home-made buggy.  Dear Tim.  He died the following year. He was only 19.

Part 5 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist.  her books are available from Amazon/Kindle worldwide or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.  They are also available as e-books (£1.99) from http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk

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It happened like this....an English family moves to France Part 3

 Our house in Breuil Magne

The Charente Maritime, 1990.

Our second house was a 17th century stone dwelling, with a huge barn extention in to which an indoor swimming pool had been installed.  There was also an orchard and the derelict vestiges of a tennis court.  The pool was deep and dark and remained freezing cold all year, summer or not.  We tried to swim in it once or twice. In the ceiling of the pool room were large electric velux windows, and french doors lined all of one wall.  The room was sort-of finished and had fancy lighting and a grotesque bar attagement, wallpaper at one end and tiles on the floor.  The previous owners had clearly had some money and then run out; a lot of the house was unfinished.

Breuil-Magne is a village on the outskirts of Rochefort, just south of La Rochelle.  The word breuil means hamlet in old French and magne (magnus), of course, is Latin for big.  It boasted a population of about 3000, a village school, a small shop and, as always, the boulangerie.

When we first drove in to Rochefort, while we were still house-hunting,  we couldn’t believe our eyes – the modern world!  Automatic doors!  Real supermarkets ! (still no cereal, tea or fresh milk though) A chemist that didn’t look like a scene from the Munsters!  Restaurants that were actually open most days and proposed more than 2 dishes!  Banks that didn’t look like the village post office!  After just seven months in the centre of France, it was a revelation.

Despite this, the area was nonetheless very run down and grotty.  La Rochelle itself, which was already a big tourist destination, had been renovated and restored, and was a lively, bustling town with many historic buildings and museums. Goodness – gourmet restaurants, entertainment and wonderful shops!  But Rochefort, which was our local town, was a drab grey ex-military town with monstrous stone buildings and – as ever – a constant smell of septic tanks and drains.  That was a characteristic of France for many years. But, credit where credit is due, when it was renovated, along with all the towns and villages in the whole area, it was transformed rapidly in to an attractive town with beautiful historic buildings, parks, fountains, flowers and lots to see.  The French authorities invested a huge amount in to re-making broken pavements and cleaning and clearing public areas and generally bringing France up to speed. That was after we had been in the area about a year, and we used to joke that once we arrived the French thought they’d best pull their socks up!  (For my French readers – that is just a joke!)

Vauclair Castle & Abbey at La Rochelle was built by the English in 1185.  The town is rich with all sorts of ancient buildings, loaded with history, and a very good shopping centre.  It is the capital of the Charente Maritime, and the French are rightly very proud of it.

That was the Winter of the Snow.

The Charente Maritime hadn’t seen snow for something like 25 years.  The summer had been long and hot, and the heat continued well in to October or even November before turning cold and damp and nasty.  And then suddenly, one night in January, it snowed.   All winter we had been so cold, in an inadequately heated house, and so broke, that Bruce sawed up non-supporting beams in the barn for firewood.  The elder two children slept in the living room with a log fire and Jake slept in with us.  That huge old stone house was like an old-fashioned fridge – keep the outside cold and damp and the inside remains cold and damp too, so that even when the sun broke through the cloud and the temperature went up outside, it remianed freezing cold in the house.  It was absolutely horrible.

I love the lonesome tricycle sitting there in the snow!  To the left is the barn that Bruce partly dismantled in order to provide us with firewood.  There was about an acre of land, I seem to recall, and a large pond over there beyond the fence. Beyond was farmland.  It has since been built on, some 20 or 30 bungalows 

• Our car in the snow, Jake just behind it.  He’d have been coming up to 3 by then.  He attended a “Maternelle” in the village – France has an excellent system for pre-school kiddies.

As was usual in those days, the sanitary arrangements were abysmal and there was just one tiny old-fashioned bathroom and no kitchen to speak of.  These big old places almost always had a huge kitchen with a big open fireplace and, indeed, there was such a room but it had been used as a dining room and the kitchen was a tiny section of the adjoining barn, not big enough to swing a cat in and with a lamentable lack of equipement – an oven with no door was one item, I recall, and the sink was in fact a bathroom basin, pink.

So, despite lack of funds and the bitter cold, we set about improving and renovating as fast as we could.  We gutted the tiny kitchen and broke down the walls to make a good-sized kitchen.  We also installed another toilet upstairs. We had bought the house with the intention of a quick re-sale but now, seeing what that first winter was like, we wanted rid of the place as fast as we could.   When we had come along it had been for sale for three years. My mother-in-law and I planted hundreds of daffodil bulbs when we arrived, which was in the September – still hot – and when spring came the front garden was ablaze with colour.  Things like daffodils help to sell a house.  By the time we got our first prospective buyers the stone facade that had been frozen for months looked warm and attractive, the new kitchen looked … er … well, it looked … shall we say ethnic ? and my usual arrangements of flowers and dried herbs, draperies and zillions of interesting little touches transformed the house in to an attractive Maison de Maitre that any buyer would be interested in.

And indeed, eleven months after buying the house, we sold at a tolerably good price to the third people to view.

• The kitchen!  We didn’t get much beyond this, but that room on the left became a big walk-in larder.  We had a sink and an old cooker and fridge, of course, and when viewers were coming round I put large bunches of dried leaves and grasses up on the beams, a big bowl of fruit on the table, a huge chopping board covered with vegetables, several racks of eggs …. it made the place look wholesome.  Unfinished, but wholesome.

That was also the Year of the Gestapo.

Our accountant, who was stunningly unhelpful, told us to not refer to the tax inspectors as The Gestapo.  Apart from that, he did and said nothing to help us.  The law has since changed and professional people now have a responsibility to their clients, but at the time he had no responsibility at all.

So, one day towards the end of that dreadful winter, two men and a woman turned up at our front door and asked to see the cahier.  Cahier means excercise book.

What cahier ? I asked.

I looked them up and down.  All three were wearing trench coats and the woman had a hat on, a kind of trilby affair.

The cahier.  The cahier of your accounts and activities, they said.

Ah, said I.  No problem!  We have only been here a few months and I have made just one sale.  It is in my head.

I had a phenomenal memory in those days.  I could remember the clients’ names, the addresses & prices of the properties, where and which and when and how – no problem.

Non, non, they shook their heads.  It is the law that you have it written down in a cahier.

Well, I smiled at them,  the accountant has all that kind of thing … and I shooed them away.

I really didn’t give it a great deal of thought afterwards.  I suppose I might have mentioned it to Bruce, I don’t know.  We had a proper accounting firm for precisely this kind of thing and, apart from being moderately amused by their bizarre dress-sense, I forgot about it.  Weeks, months tripped on by, spring arrived.  It was vastly warmer out of doors than it was inside.  I caught my skirt on fire standing too close to a gas heater; Jake had bad gastro troubles and had to go in to hospital (that was the only week I was warm), I wished we had a microwave, the children’s homework was such a chore, the mimosa hadn’t survived the snow … life went on …

It was a legal requirement to keep a written record of each and every transaction, even if there had been only one, and we discovered this some months later when the Gestapo wrote to us.  You have no cahier!  cried the letter with disgust.  Any details the accountant already had were not the cahier. No Tippex, and only a single line for crossing-out.  Each page must be signed and dated.  All details of the vendor, the buyer, the property etc. must be neatly entered.  C’est la loi.

No worries, I said, I’ll do it now, no problem.

But no, that was not acceptable.  Worse, not only was it la loi, but not doing it carried a heavy fine: 250 000 francs – about £23 000 at that time.  I stood staring at the letter for some time, re-reading it, convinced I had misunderstood something.  No, they were fining us 250 000 francs.

As it was, I was unhappy and lost in France.  The winter had been dreadful and there were still months to go before the summer influx of clients, ie money.   William was miserable at school.  Bruce still hadn’t learnt any French.  I had joined keep fit in the village and went along every week, and it was fun …. but I made no friends.  There was nobody I could talk to.  I felt completely bludgeoned, exhausted, and homesick.

• La Rochelle is lovely but avoid it during August.

I found a lawyer in La Rochelle

He was an expert at this kind of thing and came recommended by our accountant – so I was not certain if it was a good recommendation or not.   La Rochelle was about twenty minutes’ drive from our house, and I was not yet familiar with it.  It is quite a big town actually, with a population of   about 75 000.  I parked in the centre of the crowded town in a place that has since become a modern multi-storey car park.  In those days it was just a traditional French place, difficult to get in and out of, with a little man in a beret taking your money and giving you a small pink ticket.   After some time I found the lawyer’s office, wedged at the top of a narrow staircase in one of the old buildings opposite the front de mer.  He was a nice guy, understood my predicament, but explained that this kind of case could not be won.  He told me that when the authorities have a fine like this, and it is la loi, whether I didn’t understand or not, and whether the accountant/ Chamber of Commerce/ whatever should have told me or not, that was the end of that.  I would have to pay it.  I felt sick, really sick.

I travelled back and forth between the lawyer, the accountant (who made it absolutely clear he didn’t give tuppence) and the tax office many times, determined there was a way out of this predicament. More stressy weeks went by.  Then more.  I refused to pay it.  See you in Court, I said. Goodness, we didn’t have the money anyway!

It dragged on and on for months and months.  I viewed properties and took clients, sold houses, looked after the children,  lived life, all the while with this huge debt hanging over us.  I was worried sick.  The lawyer explained that the most likely outcome would be that I would be obliged to pay a certain amount every month till the debt was paid off.

What made us stay ?

It would have been easy enough to have just cut and run.  We could (probably) have sold the house and left.  That is what tthe lawyer himself advised us to do – just go, he said. Everything seemed to threaten.  Everybody seemed a menace.  Every time the phone rang or every time the post arrived I was convinced there was some disaster.  We had done nothing wrong.  In fact, we had done everything right.  It ate at me, gnawed at me like a canker, the way troubles do.

But where would we have gone ?  Had we cut and run, what could we have done?  Pippa was doing well at school, William was starting to adjust and had got little chums. Business, once spring arrived, was good – excellent in fact.  We had no house and no income at home.

Also, of course, we were fighters.  No way was I going to allow anybody or anything to knock us flat.  We had lost everything in the UK.  It would not happen again.

Me tucking in somewhere!

Eventually, I appeared in Court in La Rochelle.  Funnily enough I was almost an hour late because the summons had been hand-written and the address looked like “rue de l’Ecole” when in fact it was “rue de l’Escale“.  It was a very hot day and I drove around the congested streets almost beside myself, cursing under my breath, trying to find the appropriate street, and then trying to find somewhere to park.  You’d have thought that being so late would herald disaster, but it didn’t.

The lawyer, frantic on my behalf, was champing at the bit, scurrying up and down the corridor looking for me.  His face had gone from ruddy to purple and his hair stood up at odd angles. He flapped papers in my face.  He had prepared a chart for me, showing how much I could pay each month.  Vastly more agitated than I was, he bade me follow him up another narrow staircase to a large room.

Three men were waiting at a circular table and my lawyer explained about the hand-written address which had been written by the little man sitting to the left.  I grinned at him and we sat down.   I was not nervous.  I have never been nervous talking to other people, whoever they are.  It never occurs to me to be nervous.  The man on the right was a judge and other two men were from the tax office.  Several bonjours went back and forth.  Also some hand shaking. The tax people, after some clearing of throats went first.  They wanted me to pay interest on the “debt”, so the amount had already gone up considerably.  The one on the left was scribbling notes and I made a little laughing comment about his handwriting.  The lawyer looked uncomfortable, adjusted his glasses and shuffled papers. He put my case.  He pointed out that I had done everything required by law – at the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of this and the Chamber of that and everything in-between.  It was just this cahier business I hadn’t got right.  But he sounded so wishy-washy.  Lord, was he on the brink of apologizing for me??!!

May I speak ? I asked.  I raised my hand as if in a classroom, and I saw the faintest hint of a smile pass across the judge’s face.  Yes, said Monsieur le Juge.  So I spoke.  The trouble here, I argued, lies not with my ineptitude to write in a cahier, but with the local authorities who didn’t furnish me with the appropriate information.  If you want to fine somebody, I said, fine them.

The judge agreed.  I won.

Part 4 to follow.

Catherine Broughton is a writer, a poet and an aritst.  Her books are available from Amazon/Kindle worldwide, or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries.  They can also be purchased as e-books (£1.99) from this site:-

Click here for part 2

Raising Debbie: I am a Powerful Woman

When we looked at Debbie, aged fifteen, going on sixteen, we felt proud. We had done well. We had raised her and her two brothers to be independent, kind, caring, self-assured, decent people.

Debbie had always had everything, from the buckets of family love and devotion, to the hours of attention through various childhood ups and downs, to the more tangible things like skiing and horse riding.

No, I don’t think she was spoilt. I worked, so she knew all about the dashing-around-I-haven’t-got-time-right-now, not to mention all the “I’ll be half an hour late picking you up from school”. She didn’t suffer for it and I don’t think children do, providing they know that they are loved and cared for in every way.

She had to work for her pocket-money. Just simple household chores – wash the cat’s bowls, empty the dishwasher, and so on. Nothing unreasonable.

So, no, she wasn’t spoilt.

She was a nice kid. A kid to be proud of.

So how do you cope when it all goes horribly wrong? What does a mother do when her lovely daughter starts to do all the things – the very things – you had trusted her not to do?

How do you handle it when she turns, seemingly overnight, from a sunny, cheerful teen to an obstreperous, snarling one?

When Debbie was almost sixteen she ran away from home with a thirty-five year old man who had just got out of prison. Out of the blue. She had had a tattoo done on one of her breasts, and I had been angry and hurt about that. A small butterfly, or a flower on a thigh or shoulder is one thing – but this was the head of a horse, very badly done, and huge. She had also, for several weeks, been slightly rude to me. Nothing much, just a bit of back-talk at odd intervals, which I ignored. So it was out of the blue.

Debbie put us through six years of nightmare. For four of those years she disappeared completely and we had no idea where she was or how she was. Alcohol, drugs, pregnancies, rape, police … you name it, we went through it.

Debbie came out the other end of it a pleasant young woman, relatively unscathed. We have a close relationship now, and I think I can say I am relatively unscathed too. But her dad has never really properly recovered. Her behavior triggered Meniere’s disease which has been with him 24/7 ever since – fifteen years now. He is clingy in his love for his daughter in a way that is perhaps slightly …. I can’t find the word … desperate, perhaps?

I am a strong woman. Very strong. I learnt to be strong at an early age. I went to fourteen different schools as a child. I changed country and changed language frequently. Sometimes we lived on a leper colony in Africa (my dad was a doctor of tropical disease). I was the eldest in a huge family. These things make you strong. From an early age you have to make or break. It is good for you.

I won’t go in to all the things that helped me, in adulthood, build-up my muscle (so to speak) but suffice to say that I dealt with A LOT. Never, when I was expecting my baby girl, did I imagine that she would be the cause of the biggest test. As part of my “recovery” process I wrote a book, “A Call from France” which was like a kind of catharsis for me.

Here are five thoughts I want to share with mothers who are going through traumas with their teenage children.

TRUST
Show your children that you trust them. This does not mean that you should necessarily trust them, but allow them to feel trusted. Trust, within reason, triggers responsible behavior. They do not need to know that you are still supervising quietly from a distance.

Do The Best You Can
My father always used to say that a parent can only do what seems to be the best thing at that particular moment. We all make mistakes and wish we had done things differently. As long as you are genuinely doing what you think is the best thing for your child, then that is what you must do, even if it turns out to be the wrong thing.

Still Learning
Teens, like children, are essentially selfish. By that I do not mean they are unkind in any way, I mean that their thoughts and feelings tend to centre, perfectly naturally, on themselves. Just as a small child learns to share his toys, so teenagers need to be learn to see the bigger picture. It is something they learn, so do not expect them to understand overnight your feelings when their own psyche has not developed enough yet.

What Do They Love?
I do wish that I had got Debbie involved in something she really loved, for I often think that might have made things turn out differently. Horse-riding or archery or whatever – I do think that if she had had a passion for something like that, it would have been better.

Relax
Know that it will be All Right. Children come home. Children grow up and become sensible adults. Some take you through the mill en route, and some do not. Relax. It is going to be OK. Not today, not tomorrow. But soon.

Catherine Broughton is an author, an artist and a poet. Her books can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries, and are available on Amazon/Kindle. You can also down load them as e-books from her web site http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk
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Catherine Broughton. Novels, paintings, and poems

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People from my books: Debbie

She was a skinny little thing.  Scrawny.  She never put on weight.  As she grew in to adolescence she remained basically lanky and thin.  She had miles of legs.  When she tried ballet, as all little girls do, she was already taller than most of the others in her class and, although she had a grace of her own, it was nothing like what the teacher tried to coax out of her.

Oddly enough, Jasmina at this same age, was chunky. No, not overweight, just strong and chunky.  The French call it “bien plante” (well planted).  Mark you, Jasmina had horses and that made her immensely fit, so one can’t compare.  Odd, when you think what a muscle-maniac Hussein was.  I wonder if he ever thinks about Debbie and the children ?  And, if he does, would he be pleased that Jasmina has that same muscular physique …?

Extract from “A Call from France”:-

When we watched Debbie whizzing down the pistes, all her cares forgotten, we knew we had made the right decision. She skied well, with an instinctive elegance. She was cautious but fun-loving, and both she and Max braved the black pistes with no bother, invariably meeting us at the bottom. We rapidly gave names, as I daresay most families do, to the meeting points.

“We’ll meet for hot chocolate at Grizzly Bear café” one of us would announce, or perhaps “when we get to the end of Red Apple piste (named after Bernie ’s cheeks) we’ll go for lunch.”

Two weeks tripped by on the snowy slopes. We were both extremely conscious of Debbie and we did everything we could to make sure she really enjoyed it. Max had to pretend to be over sixteen (easy enough when you’re tall) in order to get in to the disco with Debs every night. We didn’t dare count how much we were spending, but they returned in the small wee hours full of fun, and Max told me there was nothing of any note to report. Debbie danced a lot, he told me, she chatted a lot.

“She can be SO EMBARRASSING!” he declared.

Girls are, I replied.

Ironically the café we skied past on our way to the first lift had to be called …. wait for it – Costa. It couldn’t possibly have been “The Coffee Shop” or “Café des Pistes” or something like that. No, it had to be called Costa. I don’t know if Debbie noticed – I certainly didn’t draw her attention to it.

A couple of times during day time Debbie and Max met friends they had made at the disco, but of course most people were there only the one week.

“Does Debs show any interest in the other boys?” I asked Max .

“Yes – in all of them!”

“Does she dance with them? Is she having fun?”

“Oh yes! She dances a lot. She’s quite good at it. She dances with all the boys. She’s having a great time.”

“And you, Max ?” I asked, looking up at his young face with just the first hints of a bit of hair on his chin, “are you having a nice time too?”

“Brilliant!” he grinned at me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but Debs has forgotten about Costa. She’s looking forward to going to college in Brighton next year. She told me so.”

Sometimes he was so wise for his tender years. He was certainly reassuring. I looked at him. Dressed almost entirely in black he still had the figure of a boy and I suspected he was extremely pleased at being able to go to the disco because of Debbie …

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