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of an effort to speak the language did the trick. A switch flicked in his head and within an-
other fortnight he seemed almost fluent and on a par, 'academically', with his classmates.
Samuel, having been born in England, is the most 'English' of our three boys, by which I
mean he bottles his emotions up and says 'Bugger' a lot. Maurice and Thérence were both
born in France and Thérence, the youngest, is to my mind the most French; he has strong
opinions which he's prepared to stand up for and if he doesn't get his way he'll down tools.
Maurice, on the other hand, is a sensitive soul, an artist, a 'creative' who wears his heart on his
sleeve but who has, on occasion, a streak of Anglo-Saxon in him that very definitely marks
him out as being different from his peers, insisting on wearing an England football kit to his
football training being one example.
Maurice was born a few months after our arrival and it was a glorious summer. I was able to
take almost a month off work, Natalie's parents stayed in France until the autumn, her grand-
parents were around the corner and the new arrival attracted a multitude of family visitors. It
was only when I was back working, and twice as much to pay off the month's parental leave,
that Natalie started to feel cut off. Her parents returned to the UK, her grandfather, Papy, be-
came ill and couldn't easily drive himself and Mamie out to see her and the boys. The nights
drew in and it quickly became a lonely existence, as I was away more and more. The support
network that was around when we first had Samuel was not in France and we hadn't yet made
firm friends in our new home, just acquaintances who couldn't fill that gap. She was feeling
lonely, isolated and, despite the demands of two young children and a large house, unoccu-
pied and bored.
So we began a search for a part-time job and a child minder, une nourrice , who could look
after Maurice for the day and Samuel as well after school. The nourrice bit was easy. A brief
search in Les Pages Jaunes showed one living just a couple of minutes' drive away, a lovely
woman named Brigitte who had three daughters of her own, two of whom were similar ages
to Samuel and Maurice. More importantly, she had room for our boys, as there is a legal lim-
it to the number of children a child minder can look after at any one time. Brigitte and her
husband, Eric, quickly became friends of the family, which immediately took the pressure off
Natalie a bit.
As if to underline that we had done the right thing by moving out here, a job fell into
Natalie's lap. We certainly hadn't been confident of that. We had actually moved to a very
poor part of France, just off the main chateaux tourist trail and apart from agriculture there
really isn't very much going on. Back in England Natalie had been a successful recruitment
consultant and she didn't just want a job so that she could get out of the house, she wanted
something that would stretch her a bit.
She got far more than she had bargained for.
Initially, when she started work as an estate agent, une négotiatrice d'immobilier , in town,
it seemed like the ideal job. She was able to work just on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays,
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