had been an incredible journey to get there. Though a new beginning, it also marked the end of a long and tortuous road, involving our whole family. My own part of the story starts in France.
L’Ancienne Bergerie, June 2004, and life was good. My wife Katherine and I had just made the final commitment to our new life by selling our London flat and buying two gorgeous golden-stone barns in the heat of the south of France, where we were living on baguettes, cheese and wine. The village we had settled into nestled between Nîmes and Avignon in Languedoc, the poor man’s Provence, an area with the lowest rainfall in the whole of France. I was writing a column for the Guardian on DIY, and two others in Grand Designs magazine, and I was also writing a book on humour in animals, a long-cherished project which, I found, required a lot of time in a conducive environment. And this was it.
Our two children, Ella and Milo, bilingual and sun burnished, frolicked with kittens in the safety of a large walled garden, chasing enormous grasshoppers together, pouncing amongst the long parched grass and seams of wheat, probably seeded from corn spilled from trailers when the barns were part of a working farm. Our huge dog Leon lay across the threshold of vast rusty gates, watching over us with the benign vigilance of an animal bred specifically for the purpose, panting happily in his work.
It was great. It was really beginning to feel like home. Our meagre 65 square metres of central London had translated into 1200 square metres of rural southern France, albeit slightly less well appointed and not so handy for Marks & Spencer, the South Bank, or the British Museum. But it had a summer which lasted from March to November, and locally grown wine which sells for £8 in Tesco cost three and a half euros at source. Well you had to, it was part of the local culture. Barbeques of fresh trout and salty sausages from the Cévennes mountains to our north, glasses of chilled rosé with ice which quickly melted in the heavy southern European heat. It was idyllic.
This perfect environment was achieved after about ten years of wriggling into the position, professionally and financially, where I could just afford to live like a peasant in a derelict barn in a village full of other much more wholesome peasants earning a living through honest farming. I was the mad Englishman; they were the slightly bemused French country folk, tolerant, kind, courteous, and yet inevitably hugely judgemental.
Katherine, whom I’d married that April after nine years together (I waited until she’d completely given up hope), was the darling of the village. Beautiful and thoughtful, polite, kind and gracious, she made a real effort to engage with and fit into village life. She actively learned the language, which she’d already studied at A level, to become proficient in local colloquial French, as well as her Parisian French, and the bureau-speak French of the admin-heavy state. She could josh with the art-gallery owner in the nearby town of Uzès about the exact tax form he had to fill in to acquire a sculpture by Elisabeth Frink – whom she also happened to have once met and interviewed – and complain with the best of the village mums about the complexities of the French medical system. My French, on the other hand, already at O-level grade D, probably made it to C while I was there, as I actively tried to block my mind from learning it in case it somehow further impeded the delivery of my already late book. I went to bed just as the farmers got up, and rarely interacted unless to trouble them for some badly expressed elementary questions about DIY. They preferred her.
But this idyll was not achieved without some cost. We had to sell our cherished shoebox-sized flat in London in order to buy our two beautiful barns, totally derelict, with floors of mud trampled with sheep dung. Without water or electricity we couldn’t move in straight away, so in the week we exchanged contracts internationally, we also moved locally within the village, from a rather lovely natural-stone summer let which was about to treble in price as the season began, to a far less desirable property on the main road through the village. This had no furniture and neither did we, having come to France nearly two years before with the intention of staying for six months. It would be fair to say that this was a stressful time.
So when Katherine started getting migraines and staring into the middle distance instead of being her usual tornado of admin-crunching, packing, sorting and labelling efficiency, I put it down to stress. ‘Go to the doctor’s, or go to your parents if you’re not going to be any help,’ I said, sympathetically. I should have known it was serious when she pulled out of a shopping trip (one of her favourite activities) to buy furniture for the children’s room, and we both experienced a frisson of anxiety when she slurred her words in the car on the way back from that trip. But a few phone calls to migraine-suffering friends assured us that this was well within the normal range of symptoms for this often stressrelated phenomenon.
Eventually she went to the doctor and I waited at home for her to return with some migraine-specific pain relief. Instead I got a phone call to say that the doctor wanted her to go for a brain scan, immediately, that night. At this stage I still wasn’t particularly anxious as the French are renowned hypochondriacs. If you go to the surgery with a runny nose the doctor will prescribe a carrier bag full of pharmaceuticals, usually involving suppositories. A brain scan seemed like a typical French overreaction; inconvenient, but it had to be done.
Katherine arranged for our friend Georgia to take her to the local hospital about twenty miles away, and I settled down again to wait for her to come back. And then I got the phone call no one ever expects. Georgia, sobbing, telling me it was serious. ‘They’ve found something,’ she kept saying. ‘You have to come down.’ At first I thought it must be a bad-taste joke, but the emotion in her voice was real.
In a daze I organized a neighbour to look after the children while I borrowed her unbelievably dilapidated Honda Civic and set off on the unfamiliar journey through the dark country roads. With one headlight working, no third or reverse gear and very poor brakes, I was conscious that it was possible to crash and injure myself badly if I wasn’t careful. I overshot one turning and had to get out and push the car back down the road, but I made it safely to the hospital and abandoned the decrepit vehicle in the empty car park.
Inside I relieved a tearful Georgia and did my best to reassure a pale and shocked Katherine. I was still hoping that there was some mistake, that there was a simple explanation which had been overlooked which would account for everything. But when I asked to see the scan, there indeed was a golf-ball-sized black lump nestling ominously in her left parietal lobe. A long time ago I did a degree in psychology, so the MRI images were not entirely alien to me, and my head reeled as I desperately tried to find some explanation which could account for this anomaly. But there wasn’t one.
We spent the night at the hospital bucking up each other’s morale. In the morning a helicopter took Katherine to Montpellier, our local (and probably the best) neuro unit in France. After our cosy night together, the reality of seeing her airlifted as an emergency patient to a distant neurological ward hit home hard. As I chased the copter down the autoroute the shock really began kicking in. I found my mind was ranging around, trying to get to grips with the situation so that I could barely make myself concentrate properly on driving. I slowed right down, and arrived an hour later at the car park for the enormous Gui de Chaulliac hospital complex to find there were no spaces. I ended up parking creatively, French style, along a sliver of kerb. A porter wagged a disapproving finger at me but I strode past him, by now in an unstoppable frame of mind, desperate to find Katherine. If he’d tried to stop me at that moment I think I would have broken his arm and directed him to X-ray. I was going to Neuro Urgence, fifth floor, and nothing was going to get in my way. It made me appreciate in that instant that you should never underestimate the emotional turmoil of people visiting hospitals. Normal rules did not apply as my priorities were completely refocused on finding Katherine and understanding what was going to happen next.
I found Katherine sitting up on a trolley bed, dressed in a yellow hospital gown, looking bewildered and confused. She looked so vulnerable, but noble, stoically cooperating with whatever was asked