I was born in Alston, Cumberland, in the highest market town in England. Although I don’t remember the North very well because we moved to the Midlands when I was four years old, my four sisters and I spent many happy holidays at my grandparents’ home on a farm in Northumberland. Even with no indoor loo and a tin bath in front of the fire, it seemed like paradise for children – less so, I’m sure, for my grandparents. We played in the hay bales, building dens and finding eggs where the chickens had made nests and generally ran riot!

We moved to Rugby in 1960 and I had an uneventful but happy childhood, attending the local primary school and then the girls’ grammar school (where Pat Sansom had also been a pupil as I discovered a few years ago). With five children, my parents weren’t able to afford exotic holidays and so we spent a lot of time in Snowdonia and the Lake District, camping and climbing mountains. My father was such a lover of climbing that we used to joke that we never went anywhere flat! Those times have given me an appreciation of nature and the outdoors which I still love to this day, although I have to say that I drew the line at camping some years ago; I enjoy my creature comforts too much.

It was at the age of 16 that I had my first experience of ‘abroad’ on an exchange visit to Poitiers and I was totally hooked on France from that moment on. I absolutely loved the language, the lifestyle, the weather, the food – everything! One weekend during my stay I was taken on an excursion by the teenagers of the household, to a barn where we sang songs around campfires and drank beer into the early hours, which all seemed impossibly sophisticated and glamorous to me. I found an old scrapbook recently and discovered that this ‘grange’ had actually been near Lalinde! I would love to know exactly where and whether it still exists.

I was more determined than ever to study French, and after ‘A’ Levels I went to the University of Bradford where I enrolled on a degree course in European Studies with French and Politics. (Another coincidence – I discovered recently through the MoM feature that Maggie Fitzgerald was at Bradford at exactly the same time). I wanted to study France/French in a contemporary way rather than a traditional literature-based course, and this course was brand new – I was in only the second cohort. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have been totally convinced of the value of belonging to Europe ever since. Since 2017, I have been actively involved in an organisation called Remain in France Together (RIFT) which was set up to protect the rights of UK citizens in France and help people with Cartes de Séjour and other administrative formalities which became necessary after Brexit.

I met my future husband, Philip, on my first day at Bradford in 1974 and we have four children. I worked for L’Oréal for several years and then retrained as a French teacher; Philip was a Maths teacher who became Headmaster of two independent schools. We shared the same views on internationalism (amongst other things!) and he is a great advocate of the International Baccalaureate, a broad curriculum that values the importance of learning languages. He introduced the IB in the schools he ran and our children were lucky enough to study it, which inspired our youngest son to take a degree in Chinese at university.

We took early retirement in 2013 and moved full time to the house we had owned in the Dordogne since 2002 and where we had spent wonderfully happy holidays with the children. The drawback of being Head of an independent school is having to live in a house on the school grounds so our French home had always been an escape, a bolt hole, where nobody could track Philip down out of term time …. until the advent of skype and wifi of course! The ‘children’ still consider where we live near Beaumont du Périgord as their family home and they love bringing their own children here now. Our daughter was married locally last summer and we had a marvellous day, with our families from the UK and beyond managing to join us for a week of celebrations.

 I was President of DLCI from 2019-22 and, despite the tricky times with Covid 19 and confinement, I thoroughly enjoyed the role. DLCI is a fantastic association and through it I have made many friends of different nationalities. I enjoy our social gatherings and book club, in particular. DLCI is a great resource for newcomers to the area and I wish it continued success.