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Let’s not forget how it was before Europe made us civilised

In France I learnt how to eat, dress, drink in moderation and live well. So although my knee-jerk reaction is to support Brexit, when I consider that link, I’m suddenly not so sure…

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 Photo: REX

By Helena Frith Powell

7:23PM GMT 23 Feb 2016

For someone who is half-Italian, half-Swedish, I am incredibly anti-Europe. I am thoroughly English in a way that only foreigners really are. I drink my daily cup of tea from a teapot commemorating the Diamond Jubilee, my children are all educated on this island and I even have a silly double-barrelled name.

So when Boris announced he was going to encourage everyone to vote against staying in Europe I was thrilled. “Good old Boris!” I said to my husband. “We’ve all had enough of this euro-nonsense.” Like many others I think it’s time we regained our own sovereignty.

My husband, however, looked up from his copy of Proust and said: “That’s all very well, but where does that leave us? What happens when we want to go home to France? Do we have to queue up at borders?”

We have had a home in France since 2000. For eight years we lived there full-time, working and bringing up our children in the rural French idyll. Then we realised there was not enough money to be made to bring up the children in a rural French idyll and moved to Abu Dhabi. We now live between there, France and England, spending around five months a year in France.

Travel advice: scenic driving routes in FranceThe bliss of driving in France  Photo: Alamy

Usually we take the Eurotunnel, with the car stuffed full of things that are cheaper in England or that you can’t get elsewhere. At Christmas, for example, we buy all the presents for our five children, the Christmas crackers, Bendicks Bittermints, mince pies and really useful things like J cloths, stuff them in the Land Rover and head south from Calais on blissfully empty motorways that, unlike ours, you’d never mistake for car parks.

I can’t help worrying, what will happen if there are suddenly border police everywhere, monitoring the contents of my car. Are you even allowed to bring Bendicks into France?

If we leave the EU, can I still take these to France?

The French hate chocolate with mint.

I do remember travelling to the continent in the late Seventies and it feeling like a really big deal. My mother and I, in a purple Ford Cortina, queued for hours to get off a ferry in Dieppe as the authorities checked every single passport and pulled people over to search their cars (probably looking for J cloths). It felt as abroad to me then as Abu Dhabi did on arrival in 2008.

Now France feels like home. Of course it helps that I lived there for so long, but this sense of ease is not limited to France. After several years in the Middle East, anywhere in the EU feels familiar and safe.

Of course, leaving the EU doesn’t mean leaving Europe. But there’s no point pretending that this newfound British feeling of comfort and familiarity on the continent does not exist. It has emerged since our last referendum, in 1975. So although my knee-jerk reaction is to support Brexit, when I consider that link, I’m suddenly not so sure.

I mean, think about what England was actually like pre-Europe. The food was inedible, TV was unwatchable and even the weather seemed worse than it is now, bar one decent summer in 1976.

Our relationship with continental Europe has had a positive influence on our island. In France I learnt how to eat, dress, drink in moderation and live well.

Quite apart from the practical issues of border controls, do we want to go back to a Hogarthian existence with no civilising influences? Left to our own devices we’ll all be painting ourselves blue and drinking gin. Not a good look.

Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi-based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor-in-chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is working on a thriller set in Sweden as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

In 2022 her short story The Japanese Gardener came second in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. One of her stories was also shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. When she’s not writing, she works as a headhunter for the media and entertainment industry for the Sucherman Group. 

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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