In the beginning – a place to start

An introduction to our life, rescuing a petit château hidden in the woods in a quiet corner of France.

When I started this journal, the people reading it already knew our story. They had followed us through the first few years of renovation work, watched the tale unfold on social media or in snippets on television and came along with me here as I wrote a little more about what it’s really like to live here day-to-day. But as this journal has grown, has been shared more widely (something I’m so grateful for), and is now reaching more and more people who have no idea of our back story, I’ve realised that it’s time to fill in some of the gaps, to answer a few commonly asked questions from new readers, to create a little potted history to go along with, and give context to, the stories I am slowly telling each time I publish.

In 2017, my husband Tim and I, packed up our two boys, two cats and everything else we owned, sold our house in England and moved to France. I say that this is a love story of sorts; not a love-at-first-sight-story, but a slow building romance. We were captured somehow by this petit château of ours, bewitched by her special type of magic, drawn to this house in the woods, encouraged to give up everything we knew, to see where she would lead us.

The house is hidden away in its own woodland, down a long winding, tree-lined drive, surrounded by wild flower meadows, in the quiet Sarthe countryside near Le Mans, two hours south west of Paris. The château doesn’t have turrets or a moat, it looks more like a big country manor, but it is still a château. A château isn’t, as many people think, a specific kind of building. A château gains its status from the people who lived in it, a lord, a count or a baron, someone of some noblesse once walked the halls that we now walk.

We though, come from much humbler beginnings. I am a country girl who became a journalist, working in women’s magazines. Tim is a city boy who did something unfathomable with computers. We felt there should be more to life, something outside of sitting at a desk from 9am to 5pm each day. We had no idea what that might be until we found this house.

France was never our dream in the way it is for some people. We found ourselves here almost by accident. An idea one day, an off the cuff suggestion that we sell our four-bedroom Victorian townhouse in England and swap it for a tumble-down château with six hectares of land in France. It was a way for us to step off of the treadmill, to walk away from a normal life and do something different, despite the fact that none of us could speak French.

We threw our lot in with this house and decided to follow where she might lead us. We had the vaguest of plans, the tiniest of budgets. The money soon ran out and the house had to start earning her own keep. We used what little we had to create three beautiful guest rooms that would allow us to open a little bed and breakfast. We welcome guests each summer, share our home, woods, gardens and meadows with them and earn some money to fund the next little bit of the renovation work. During the two-years of covid confinements we turned one of our outbuildings into a two-bedroom holiday cottage, working side-by-side using only what materials we had to hand or could get nearby when restrictions allowed.

The work on the house is done largely by us. We learn as we go, teaching ourselves new skills or gleaning expertise from friends and neighbours. Progress can be slow, each job involving so much more than just a lick of paint. We juggle the renovation work alongside caring for the house, the estate and our family, and running our bed and breakfast. We do everything from cleaning rooms, repairing walls and cooking for our guests, to managing our woodland, growing our own cut flowers and marketing our business. The learning curve is steep, the way forward isn’t always clear, but we live our life day-by-day, seeing where the house is going to take us next.

Our boys, Rufus and Laurie, were five and seven years old when were moved. We threw them into French school a few days after we arrived, plunging them into the deep end of a language they didn’t speak. It makes my heart hurt when I think back on it now, how much we threw at them, how well they dealt with it. But they are now bilingual, English at their cores but with a tinge of French around their edges. I wonder often how they’ll turn out, how their Frenchness or Englishness will come through as they grow up.

I began this journal in the winter of 2022 to keep a record of our everyday. I never expected so many people to come along with me, and I can’t really explain what it means to me to have you all here. I called my journal “Between” because that is where I think I shall always be. The moment you start living in another country it changes you. You belong to a unique in-between world made up of people who are not tourists but aren’t homegrown either. You become a certain type of other. When I go back to England I feel too French, when I am in France I will always be too English. I have had to get comfortable with feeling both homesick and at home all at once. I have had to learn to live in the between.

I write my journal every day and I share it with you all once a week, on a Sunday morning, to read alongside a lazy breakfast, or just before you go to bed. Many of you tell me it’s your weekly escape to France. Twice a month, sometimes more, I share my garden notes for my flower and nature lovers, and additional stories about our time here, looking back on our life in France and all that’s happened – there is an awful lot still to tell. These additional posts are for my growing number of paid subscribers, they are a thank you for their generous support, which helps to make the work that goes into the writing, creating and photographing of this journal possible each week.

You can read the journal via the email that is delivered to your inbox each week, or via the Substack app. If you download the app you can also chat to me and ask questions via Substack Notes, where I post additional little snippets about our life here as and when they occur to me, or happen. It’s lovely to hear from you, and I truly appreciate the comments and question you leave on my journal posts each week. I love to see you chatting amongst yourselves there too – swapping stories about lives and holidays in France, sharing gardening tips or exchanging thoughts. Should you ever miss a post you can find everything on the Between Homepage, every back issue of the journal, every previously published post.

While everything you read in this journal is written, photographed and produced by me, the twiddly technical bits are all managed through Substack, who provide me with the fancy computery things that allow me to send my journal to all of you each week. If you have a problem with your subscription, need to change your email address or are experiencing any technical hitches or have payment issues you can often find a solution through the Substack Help Desk. They are far better qualified than I am to help you out (see twiddly technical bits and computery things to give you an idea of my IT prowess), though I will of course try!

This will, I hope, have at least papered over some of the cracks in the story for those of you who are new here. And perhaps filled in a few gaps for those who have been around a little longer. If there is something specific that you’d like know about or want to ask, please do feel free to leave a comment, write me a note or send me an email. It’s always lovely to hear from you. Otherwise you’ll hear from me on Sunday.

Thanks so much for reading.

Rebecca x