Penny and Steve Gorridge moved to France with their two children and opened a gîte with a difference. Penny tells their story to Anthony Jeffries.
There’s always a moment when you begin to wonder whether you did the right thing by moving abroad even if, like us, it was to the country just across the Channel that we already knew well. That moment came on New Year’s Day in 2006, standing in one of our fields, watching our builder trying to climb out of a hole filled with water after he had sliced through a mains pipe no-one knew existed and cut off the supply to the whole of the village.
As the entire population (about 20) converged on the scene, I started to think we might have serious trouble with our neighbours – especially as some we hadn’t met were bearing down on me, Steve and the children.
We needn’t have worried. Even the mayor was baffled about the presence of the pipe, which wasn’t on any plan. And everyone seemed to agree that getting rid of a raging hangover was more important than dealing with a burst water pipe. The one thing no one could understand, though, was why the builder was even working on a public holiday.
That seems a long time ago now and to be honest, the two and a half years since we said goodbye to Twickenham in south-west London seems like a lifetime ago. People seem to think that when you move abroad your life slows down and you have trouble filling your days, but nothing could be further from the truth. Quite apart from running our business, Steve and I – with a little specialist help for things like electrical work – are renovating every building on our farm 20 minutes outside Angoulême in the Charente district of central France.
That’s what occupies our winters. That and the day to day running of a large farmhouse with three acres of land, a swimming pool that needs maintenance and a kitchen garden that provides a lot of the vegetables we eat.
During the summer, we move out of the main house and into the cottage next door. We let the farmhouse (we’ll even let the cottage if people want it and move in temporarily with my parents who, since last summer, have moved up the road) and offer a childcare facility to give parents a break from their busy lives while they’re on holiday.
It’s not so much a case of ‘give me your children and you can have them back the day you leave’, which is not something I would encourage for all sorts of reasons. What we aim to do is allow parents to go off and have lunch or supper, or just to sit by the pool and chat. We’re very much aware of how important that sort of time is – it has a lot to do with why we’re here in the first place.
We thought long and hard about the move and involved the children as much as possible. We had holidayed in France over the years and this was the area that felt right to us – we didn’t want to be somewhere like the Dordogne where you can feel the place is overrun by the British. What persuaded us to go was the process of renovating our house in Twickenham. Steve did most of it himself and that convinced him his future lay in working with his hands, not at a financial director’s desk.
Read the full story in our February 2008 issue.
