LITMIR.BIZ

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It was like the little girl in the movie meeting ET.

      When the excitement had died down Doris announced that I had been invited to stay for two months with the Blanchard family in France. Letters were exchanged between the two families and Doris somehow found the money necessary for my first foray into foreign fields. I was to cross the Channel alone on the ferry from Dover to Boulogne and take the train to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where Monsieur Blanchard would meet me wearing a red tie as a means of recognition.

      Ah, the innocence of those times! Fourteen years old, I was to travel out of England for the first time, to an unknown country, be met by someone I didn’t know and to put myself in the bosom of a family I knew nothing about. But Doris cheerfully accepted on my behalf (oh, how much I owe to Doris!) and I have never looked back.

      After a dreadful Channel crossing, where I sat on a lifeboat container on deck in a lime-green coat that had been bought with the last of the family’s clothes coupons and nearly died of seasickness, followed by a train ride to Paris, I climbed down the high train stairs on the platform of Gare Saint-Lazare and waited hopefully for a fatherly kind of Maurice Chevalier character to rush up and kiss me on both cheeks.

      And waited and waited.

      Perhaps M. Blanchard didn’t recognise me from my schoolgirl photograph? The previous year I had been a scruffy Girl Guide with two long plaits. I was now tall and slim with a chignon.

      I spotted a man with a red tie and boldly introduced myself.

      Wrong.

      Then did the same to another, and another.

      By then a gendarme was eyeing me suspiciously.

      I was saved from imminent arrest for loitering and soliciting by a short fat man who rushed up to me and kissed me on both cheeks.

      ‘Mlle Kate?’

      ‘Oui, monsieur,’ I said, casting a virtuous and triumphant look at the gendarme.

      M. Blanchard had been held up because there was a transport strike on in Paris and his silver Citroën had been surrounded by frustrated Parisians demanding lifts. The same thing happened on our way to the station where I was to catch the night train to Cannes and meet Agnes and the family. People shook their fists at me through the car windows and shouted what seemed like terrible insults. M. Blanchard drove calmly and silently on but at a speed that suggested we were being pursued by a thousand demons. This was my first experience of Continental driving and it was terrifying.

      Finally, I was put on the appropriate overnight train, given a little white pillow and a bottle of lemonade, re-kissed on both cheeks and left alone with the other occupants of the carriage.

      I was too excited to sleep so I went out into the rattling and swaying corridor to watch the lights of the unfamiliar landscape flash by.

      I hadn’t been out there long before a swarthy-complexioned gentleman of medium height, uncertain age and a thin moustache approached me. He spoke to me in French but I politely explained that I was a stranger to the country and spoke English and only a bit of schoolgirl French.

      ‘I am from Portugal,’ he announced, placing a protective and restraining arm round my waist.

      I was naïve, untravelled, inexperienced and fresh from a convent but I was female and immediately recognised danger signals.

      I had met my first wolf.

      (I’m not sure what that kind of man is called today, but it was a wolf when I was fourteen.)

      I hastily withdrew to the safety of my crowded compartment and as a parting shot repeated as nastily and haughtily as possible a remark that I had overheard my experienced cousin Joyce, who had been a WAAF during the war, use confidingly to a friend: ‘Latins are lousy lovers.’

      (Whether that piece of information is true or not, I’ve never found out because I’ve not had a Latin lover … yet.)

      I awoke in the early morning to sun shining on pink and white houses and the sparkling blue Mediterranean. Palm trees waved along the beaches. The train sped through ravines of red rock and hills that were covered with yellow mimosa.

      You must remember that this was 1948. I had just left a cold, grey post-war England. Here everything was glowing with light and colour. It was if I had been transported into a technicolour Hollywood movie.

      I hadn’t given a lot of thought as to where I was going to be staying. Things had moved so swiftly since that phone call that I was just living day to day, hour to hour. But if I had thought about it, I suppose I would have imagined one of those pink and white cottages I saw from the train. What I did not expect was a grand white-pillared villa facing the beach standing in about an acre of flowers and fruit trees. Inside this dwelling – the most beautiful I had ever seen in real life – a couple of maids were bustling about, being harried by a plump dowager who turned to greet me. Every feature, every gesture read matriarch. This was Madame Blanchard and she ran the villa as efficiently as she ran her husband, Agnes, Agnes’s little sister and their brother Georges, who was studying at the Sorbonne. Luckily Madame spent the greater part of the morning in bed, appearing only at mealtimes; in the evening she played Solitaire in her dressing room. M. Blanchard was still in Paris.

      We spent a month at Cap d’Antibes. The time passed for me as if in some wonderful dream of laughter, superb food, singing, dancing, swimming and sitting under the stars.

      The Blanchard siblings had crowds of young friends and cousins, and friends of Georges from the Sorbonne, who joined the party at the villa soon after I arrived.

      Schooled in a convent and having only girl friends, I was flung into the midst of any number of young men whose gaiety and lack of inhibitions were infectious. I quickly learned to parry my way through a number of innocent flirtations and soon felt like a really experienced woman of the world.

      We went everywhere. We would divide up into two parties, and pile into ancient Citroëns. I drove along the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, saw Errol Flynn (think the Brad Pitt of the 40s) on his yacht at Cannes, leaned over the parapet outside the prince’s palace in Monaco and looked down on the unforgettable view of Monte Carlo. I gazed reverently at the casino (where I would have a flutter 30 years later), inspected the perfumeries and fields of carnations and roses at Grasse, where I daringly spent my tiny amount of pocket money on a bottle of Chanel No. 5, and visited the village where Picasso lived and created some of his famous plates.

      The Duke and Duchess of Windsor owned the villa next door to the Blanchards and we would sometimes see them walking in their garden holding hands. The Duke of Windsor had been King of England before he abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson – and now here he was next door!

      One day we all went up a mountain where the boys raced their cars down the narrow road and screeched their tyres around hairpin bends as each tried to overtake the other.

      I still cherish those early memories – of coming down to breakfast on Easter Sunday to find the table profusely decorated with snowy camellias; of my first glimpse of undersea life when, armed with goggles and flippers, I swam among delicate fronds of seaweed and watched tiny bright fish moving silently and small crabs scuttling about on the rocky bottom; of the flower market at Nice; and gathering the fluffy balls of mimosa on the steep hills overlooking the sea.

      Back in Paris, at the Blanchards’ huge five-bedroomed apartment a few steps away from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, Agnes went back to school, Georges resumed lectures at the Sorbonne, and I was left alone to walk the Left Bank and discover the City of Lights by myself.

      Some mornings I went shopping in the little markets with Madame Blanchard to buy fruit, vegetables and meat and watched her haggle over prices with the stall keepers. Other mornings we would cross one of Paris’s famous bridges and walk to the Champs-Élysées, where we would meet Simone, Agnes’s cousin, who was shortly to be married. We would shop for silk and lace for her trousseau and then drink coffee and nibble pastries in a pâtisserie where chic women accompanied by equally chic dogs sipped their coffee.

      Then we would stroll to the streets where the

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