大象传媒

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Francoise' father was made a Prisoner of War. Francoise' Swiss mother decided that if she made friends with the Germans she could get her husband back. At first friendship meant a meal and a bottle of wine. But, Francoise recalls, "Before we knew where we were, the house was full of Germans. My mother and her two sisters-in-law, moved into a flat in the middle of town where they started what can only be described as a brothel."

The activities of her mother and aunts made the family very unpopular. "People were very angry, but did not dare show it to the adults because they were afraid my mother and aunts would tell the Germans. So they took it out on me. Eventually when a crowd of children mobbed me at school I was thrown out by the headmistress, a nun. My mother became ill when I was nine, and died. I was put in an orphanage 3 days after her death."

Francoise' father was eventually released but she says "My mother made me promise I would never tell him. When he came back, I didn't know that he'd already been told. He took me to the flat and started to quiz me and I kept saying 'I don't know, I don't know.' He never forgave me. The shutters came down from that moment on. He'd promised to take me out of the orphanage but after this particular episode, he wouldn't. I was in there nearly 5 years."

When she was asked to go to Switzerland to live with her mother's family, Francoise hoped it would be a release. "This secret was really terrible. I was nearly 14. When I got to Switzerland, I tried to talk to my aunt and she was absolutely furious with me. Looking back, Francoise realises that her family were "blaming me for wanting to acknowledge it. I was ill at ease with my family because I couldn't talk. And they were with me. I felt as though I was a time bomb."

In 1953 Francoise escaped to England , at first as an au pair, and then to train as a nurse. Twenty years later, through her work in the nursing profession she found herself back in her home town, Avranches, and in the hospital where her mother had died "I sort of flipped inside my head. I felt pretty awful. When I came back I decided the time had come to sort this out and I did. I began to talk with friends, and people who had known me for years were amazed. The moment I began to feel at ease with it, everybody else was as well."

Francoise had seen her father once, briefly, in 1957 "He was very drunk and very maudlin, so I just went away the next day. I've never seen him since." Her mother, Francoise remembers if not with affection, then indulgence "I do understand much more what activated her, so it makes it very easy to forget the bad years and remember the jolly, intelligent, cultured woman who sat at the table and taught me poetry."