How we got here
The trajectory of my life may not have ever taken us to France had a country pub not burned down in England thirty-four years ago.
The story of how we came to live in this Medieval village snuggled into the foothills of the Cevennes begins in the winter of 1989. I was living in London, studying theatre at the British American Drama Academy. It was a junior year study abroad program that allowed me the luxury of studying only theatre. Not only acting, but stage combat, theatre criticism, theatre history, movement, and voice. I shared a flat with five other actors, rehearsing scenes in our living room, buying restricted-view cheap seats for shows, and lacing our coffee with Bailey’s.
My favorite teacher was Bill Homewood, who was also a successful actor on the West End and in television and film. He could coach an actor to take a monologue that sounded pretty good to me and elevate it to a riveting piece of art. He knew just how to draw the best performances out of us. He was also kind. One day I had a traumatic experience in a class with another teacher, who had reawakened fears associated with recent experiences with violent men by forcing me to remain sandwiched between two men during an exercise, long past the point of productive pedagogy. The last one to leave the classroom, sobbing, I wrenched the door closed behind me, catching the latch on my thumb, which began bleeding. (Thirty-four years later, I still have the scar, a faint white line).
Enter Bill. After we’d dealt with the bleeding, I spilled everything that had happened with the other teacher. He comforted me and said the teacher ought to have stopped the exercise when it was no longer working as an exercise. Our conversation encouraged trust. I worked my hardest in his class, cared most about his opinion.
When we were all assigned roles in the two productions that would cap our time in London, Bill cast me as the Prostitute in Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. All the parts in La Ronde are of relatively equal size, given that each person gets two scenes. My two scenes opened and closed the play. My character slept with a man who then slept with someone else in the next scene, who then slept with someone else, etc., until it came back around to me. Because all of the scenes were either pre- or post-coital, most of them involved various stages of undress.
We rehearsed in our clothing until the last few weeks, when we had grown confident in our roles and comfortable with our scene partners. When it came time to disrobe for the inevitable dress—or undress—rehearsal, Bill asked if I would lead the way, to put the others at ease. I spent much of my youth swimming naked in Vermont ponds, and attended a high school where this practice continued. Most people I knew had seen me naked already, in purely (or at least relatively) innocent situations.
Unfortunately, I forgot to warn my scene partner that I wasn’t going to be wearing any clothing for our opening scene. When I sat up in bed and the covers slid from my shoulders, he froze. “Line!” he finally shouted to the prompter. But after that it became easy. It helped that my scene partner was a boy I trusted, and who became such a good friend that we ended up traveling through Italy together months later. The others followed my lead, although the script didn’t require them to be fully naked.
But how did this get me to France? Bill and his wife Estelle Kohler, a famed actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company (a photo of her playing Ophelia is in my complete works of Shakespeare), invited us all to a British dinner of bangers and mash at their apartment. It was the end of term, and I was planning to use my meager savings to backpack around Europe until I began working in the Alps. “We have a house in France,” Bill and Estelle said. “Come stay with us when you pass through.”
I had originally planned to spend the summer working in a pub in the British countryside. How I got that job is a different story, involving a solo trek through the Cotswolds, walking twenty miles in the rain one day before I found the pub, where the landlady sat me by the fire, washed my clothing, and eventually offered me a job. But just before the end of term, I received a letter from this landlady. Her sister’s pub had burned down, so her sister would be taking my job at her pub.
I was crushed. It wasn’t only the loss of a job and income—I also had a huge crush on the bartender. But then my father found me the job working in the Alps. I would spend a month there, swinging a pickaxe to rebuild a farmhouse, and they would house and feed me. I had time beforehand to explore Europe a little. This was back in the time of travelers’ checks, and when I could survive three months in Europe on $500. I stayed in hostels, lived on bread, cheese, and cherries, and washed my few items of clothing in sinks. Toward the end of my travels, I was on my way from seeing a friend in Spain to meeting another in Italy when I decided to stop in to see Bill and Estelle.
Their home was in a village called Sauve. Estelle met me at the bus. Bill was busy working in London, but Estelle was accompanied by her nephew Rowan, a boy about my age visiting from her native South Africa. I had meant to stay just a night or two, but I enjoyed their company so much and Estelle was so grateful for my French and such a perfect host that I stayed until I had to leave for Italy. She illuminated the rooms of their stone house with candles, picked herbs in the mountains for our dinners, and served wine and olives on the roof. It was a beautiful village, I thought then, but so far away from life.
Twenty-two years later, Tim and I decided that we might want a permanent home somewhere. He had always wanted to live in France, which appealed to me as well. French was the language I spoke best. As we began looking around. Joanna, the Scottish head of the British development program in Yemen, offered us her home in the village of Pompignan as a base for our search.
Our first day driving around, an eighteen-month-old Theadora in tow, we passed a sign for Sauve. “Sauve?” I said. “I wonder if that is the Sauve I stayed in back in 1989.” We stopped in the village and wandered around, as I tried to remember where Bill and Estelle’s house was. We had stayed in touch for a few years, and I had also become penpals with Rowan once he was back in South Africa, but it had now been decades since we had spoken.
We didn’t find Bill and Estelle on that trip, but once we were back home, Tim found them on the Internet, as they were renting out part of their property as a gite (French version of AirBnB). I promptly wrote a long letter to Bill, asking if he remembered me and saying we had recently been in Sauve. Was he still there? He shocked me by writing a long letter back. “Remember you?” he said. “How could I ever forget your performance in La Ronde?” He and Estelle were now permanently in France, in a village near Sauve. When were we returning?
The next time we visited, they invited us to their home, a spacious ranch with horses, dogs, chickens, cats, and donkeys. (When I asked Estelle if she ever missed performing, she said, “not since I met my quarterhorse!”). I introduced them to Tim and Theadora, and we picked up the threads of our friendship. With their help, we looked at house after house in the region, finding nothing we loved, until we walked into the stone house where I am writing. I hadn’t even gotten to the second floor when I knew it felt like home.
We’re still fortunate enough to be friends with Bill and Estelle, who have just built themselves a stunning new home nearby. I remain in awe of their many talents and their generosity. I’ve also re-encountered Rowan, who visited a year or two ago. We shared mince pies and reminisced about our lost youth.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to my life if that pub had not burned down in England. I would have spent my summer working in an English pub, perhaps fallen in love with that bartender. Perhaps never gotten to the rest of Europe, spent months practicing French, or visited Bill and Estelle. I might be someone else entirely. Or what if our Scottish friend in Yemen had never offered us her house nearby, and we had never stumbled on Sauve. We could be living an entirely different life in Avignon.
There are so many turning points like this, places where life divides in ways with unpredictably far-reaching consequences. If another example is needed, the boy I fell in love with my senior year in high school ended up decades later being the person who invited me to Yemen, a move that changed my life more completely than any other. But that is a story I have already told.
The next time something derails all your plans, say, a pub where you were supposed to work burns down, just think, maybe it’s your future calling from a different direction.
I’d love to hear about your own turning points, the places where your life memorably forked. As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments.
This is excellent, Jennifer. I quite enjoyed reading it.
This is a beautiful story!