A year in France: One family's attempt to live across the Channel

It was a life-changing decision. We didn't give it much thought. There wasn't time.

One moment we were in Northamptonshire, living comfortably in the same village-based routine we'd been living in for a decade and a half. Then, within weeks of first considering the possibility, we had moved to France.

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It wasn't my idea; I wasn't even in favour. None the less, it happened. That is, several things happened.

First: school. We had been happy with the local primary school for years and were now, suddenly, worried about it. I don't know if it was the abrupt departure of the fourth head in two years that tipped the balance, or the prospect of Isobel, our eldest, starting her final year in a class of 35 without a form teacher, or the simple observation that, if we compared our children's work with work they had done a year earlier, they seemed to have been going backwards. None the less, the balance tipped. Like millions of other parents, we began to torment ourselves with such unanswerable questions as "Surely we owe our children a slightly better education than this?"

Nothing would have come of this fretting had Clare, my wife, not happened to share our worries with a friend, Peter, who has a holiday home in southern France. Peter is retired; his wife, Pam, teaches. So the house tends to lie empty in term-time, which worries them. "Why don't you go and live in my house for a year?" he asked.

Nothing would have come of this, either, had we not discovered a few days later that some friends of friends were looking for a house in our area to rent, more or less immediately, for about a year.

Perhaps the idea wasn't quite as insane as we'd assumed.

There were obvious difficulties. I spend three days each week working in London. "Never mind," said Clare. "You can fly back with Ryanair for £1 a time" - which turned out to be more or less true (excluding tax). Since I also had an elderly father living alone quite near both Stansted airport and my London office, and a weekly commute from France would allow me to see more rather than less of him, this particular objection was overruled.

Clare, meanwhile, was halfway through a teacher-training course. But she found that she was allowed to take a year out from it and then pick up where she had left off; so that worry was overruled too.

Even so, I had no desire to leave England. I had things to do, friends, hobbies; and work to do from home when I wasn't in London. I didn't speak French well - unlike Clare - and had never thought of myself as a Francophile.

Meanwhile, urged Clare, it could only be done if we acted instantly. She made a flying visit to check out the school and village and declared both wonderful. The end of the summer term - on both sides of the Channel - was days away. We held a family vote. I lost.

We cleared out our house to make it habitable (a more mountainous task than you might imagine), put most of our possessions in boxes in various attics and handed it over to our new tenants - all within two months of deciding to go. Meanwhile, I booked several months' worth of absurdly cheap Ryanair flights (the cheapest was one centime) to get me to and from London. I would have felt differently about this had I known as much about the environmental cost of flying as I know now. Financially, however, it was cheaper than making a couple of train journeys a week from Northamptonshire.

Then we went to France.

The good thing about doing it so quickly was that there was no time to worry. The emotional choice for the children had been between spending September in France in a little house with a swimming pool - or going back to school. Not, as they saw it, a difficult choice. By the time the potential drawbacks had sunk in - not seeing their friends for a year; going to a new school where they wouldn't understand a word anyone said - we were already there.

"There" was a little village called St Pons de Mauchiens, in the Hérault département of Languedoc-Roussillon. As a physical location, it was idyllic: 200 or so houses scattered around a medieval hilltop settlement, surrounded by quiet vineyards with wooded hills and mountains stretching to distant horizons in every direction, all bathed in warm Mediterranean light. We fell in love with it. None the less, on the first morning of term it felt a long way from England.

Neither child spoke more than half-a-dozen words of French. "Never mind," we said. "You'll soon pick it up." Slightly to our surprise, this turned out to be true.

Edward, then eight, made friends straight away: football is more important than language in boys' friendships. Isobel, 10, hardly spoke for a fortnight - and then, to our amazement, began to speak what sounded to me like perfect French. She has a good ear, and, although her vocabulary was still limited at that stage, it was clear that she had been listening carefully.

Lessons were baffling at first, but it helped that the school was tiny - just 63 children aged two and a half to 11 and three teachers - and that the curriculum was, by English standards, basic. As soon as they could work out what was being said, the actual tuition was reasonably easy to master; which was great for their confidence. It also helped that - as required by French law - a specialist teacher gave our children weekly one-on-two language tuition until they could speak confidently. (This took about three months.) And it helped that there was a friendly, bilingual English boy in Edward's class; as well as some other very supportive English families in and near the village.

Above all, it helped that the head teacher - and indeed most of the village population - seemed determined that our year should be a happy one. It was.

Clare flung herself into village activities and was soon teaching a weekly English lesson in the school, as well as working in the village's little library. New acquaintances turned rapidly into friends. And the village changed from a pretty place to stay in to a wonderful place to live.

Some of its virtues were physical: the food, the drink, the climate, the hills, the trees, the wild flowers, the sweet-smelling semi-moorland known as garrigue, the birds of prey, the bright-coloured hoopoes and bee-eaters, the light, the air ... Just thinking about it makes me wish I were there.

But the real beauty of the place was in its people. Not only were they charming and generous and welcoming, but their whole way of life seemed conducive to happiness.

Life in rural France is more communal than in England. Every village has its Mairie and its mayor - ours sent a representative, Marie-Cecile, to our home to welcome us with a bottle of wine and a leaflet about the village. Most have their fêtes and other village celebrations - some of which, in St Pons, would continue for days at a time. Dozens of people, mostly young, would be involved in organising such events; and pretty much everyone would participate in them. I'm not sure how their livers coped, but it did mean that villagers actually knew one another, which in many English villages they don't.

Nor were there any of the class divisions that you get in England. There was no question of anyone going to private school, or to schools outside the village. The school you got was the school you got. Perhaps that meant that the village produced fewer academic high-fliers than it might otherwise have done. But it made for a happy village.

And then there were the streets. English villages in the 21st century are typically ruled by cars, without which most people cannot reach employment, shops or services, and because of which children are kept indoors for fear of accidents (or, failing that, abductions). In St Pons, cars hardly featured. Children walked happily to and from each other's houses whenever they felt like it, or played in the street - often in view of older villagers who sat outside their front-doors to watch the world go by.

It was a bonus for us that, in contrast to our lives in the UK, we didn't have lots of friends or relations in other places: pretty much everyone we knew lived within walking distance. So although we would drive from time to time to the sea, or to the mountains, or to the markets in the neighbouring towns, by English standards we hardly drove at all. This seemed strange at first - shockingly so. Then we learnt to enjoy the rediscovered sanity of being in one place - and, of course, met more people who lived within walking distance.

We often remarked on how old-fashioned it all seemed. People were courteous; children behaved as if they respected their elders; families gathered for long, life-affirming meals. It was a bit like being in England in the 1970s. There was, as in the 1970s, a flipside to this. I suspect that the teenagers sometimes felt trapped by the convention; there was a bit too much learning-by-rote at school for our children's taste; people smoked incessantly; many of the men seemed laughably sexist.

But these were minor blemishes, and none really altered our overall impression that the rural French had remembered something about how to live that much of Britain has forgotten. Travelling each week between the two countries, I kept being struck by the glaring difference between the ordinary daily cultures of the two places. London and the Home Counties were crowded, grumpy ant-hills of urgent activity - everyone seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown. In the f Languedoc, no one was in a hurry, and people seemed glad to be alive.

Perhaps they were being complacent. It seemed obvious to me that one reason why the British no longer lived like this was because it wasn't economically sustainable. The village was a great place to live because it had a proper infrastructure - school, Mairie, playing-field, tennis and other courts, shop, café, post office; and because most people had what we would consider vast amounts of time for a life outside work; and because most of its inhabitants were employed locally, notably in the surrounding vineyards, where they produced an OK wine that cannot possibly have sold in large enough quantities to pay for it all. Without direct and indirect subsidies, half the population might have to discover new ways of making a living, and the idyll might not survive.

But the great thing about being a temporary resident is that you don't have to worry about such questions. In fact, most of life's irritations seemed less important that year than they have done before or since. I attribute this partly to the fact that, for a year, we had no more possessions than the four of us could cram into a car for our outward journey; and to the fact that, knowing that our time there was all too short, we lived in the moment and made the most of the good things in life. A wise person would always live thus.

There was also the constant reassurance of thinking that, whatever happened, it was all educational. This was particularly liberating from the point of view of parenting. If our children had wanted to spend evening after evening just hanging out in the street with their friends in England, we would probably have worried or objected. Here, we were happy for them to do as they liked: partly because of the sense that the whole village was keeping an eye out for everyone's children, but also because, whatever else they were doing, at least they were doing it in French.

In slightly different circumstances, the whole experiment could have gone horribly wrong. The children might suddenly have felt panicked at the enormity of what was initially being asked of them; our neighbours might have resented the arrival of yet another English family. "You shouldn't assume that every French village is like this," several people said. But for this family, in this village, the experience would have been hard to improve.

I can't say that I enjoyed the incessant air-travel, but it was tolerable for a year. The hard thing was making my French more fluent, when I was never immersed in it for more than four days without a break. I worked hard at it, but I wish I had been as good at the language at the beginning of the year as I was at the end of it.

The working from home wasn't easy, either: not when everyone else seemed to be lounging in swimming pools or lingering over six-hour lunches or partying until dawn during the great summer fêtes.

But any marginal discomforts on my part were more than made up for by the transforming success of the adventure as an educational experience. The children discovered not just a language but a culture, a whole different way of looking at the world. Most valuable of all, they learnt the liberating and empowering lesson that "abroad", far from being something to be scared of, is a place of infinite possibility if you embrace it with enthusiasm.

And so, now I think about it, did I.

We have been back for a while now. Both children have moved on (while their former school seems well over its problems). We keep in touch with friends in St Pons and have returned several times. We still sometimes speak French among ourselves. I'm not sure why - perhaps it's because of the happy memories.

From time to time Clare moans about the English weather, or the general grumpiness and overcrowding of English life. "Why don't we ..." she's been known to muse at such moments. But I cut her off before she can get any further.