Pigtails and Pernod

What a wonderful read. Yes, I know I'm biased, but I honestly think I would have enjoyed Pigtails and Pernod just as much had it been written by a stranger. It is an engaging, warm and funny read, outlining Simona's maturing from excitable pre-teen to a young woman on the verge of adulthood. At the same time it chronicles the changing political and social landscape both among the English ex-pat community in Dieppe and at home, and the burgeoning menace of Naziism and rise of Hitler. In fact I think it would make the perfect Sunday evening drama, the episodic nature of the memoir lending itself really well to weekly instalments. If anybody has any sway with BBC drama commissioners please get in touch!

The Dieppe portrayed is full of eccentrics (not least my family, which might explain a lot...) and adventure for a teenage girl. It has fleshed out the characters whose names I have grown up with, but most of whom I never met. To me Ginny is no longer just a back view charcoal sketch by Sickert, a snob who it was felt best not to tell that my mum's parents were grocers or she would think Dad was 'marrying trade', but a fully rounded individual. I now know about her routinely navy blue wardrobe, her fondness for gardening and 'une bonne affair' (her name for horse manure, which she would rush out to collect at any point when spotted on a road nearby), and how she and her sister Eliza (known to all as Dot, although this is a curious omission from the book) ruled the roost in their respective households. 

I knew that my great-grandfather had been 'a bad man who married five wives', but not that my great-great-great-grandfather had died of drink at the age of 35, a fact that Ginny 'always an admirer of the sensational, was delighted to tell...to anybody who showed the slightest interest'.  Clearly that is where my need to know all the latest gossip comes from. I had no idea that I was related to the American consul in Dieppe, or indeed that Dieppe was important enough to warrant an American consul. 

I had never quite been able to follow the family connections on my father's side - though they were much fewer in number than on my mother's, the different generations of similar ages for some reason always proved a block. The brief Middleton family tree included in the book helped clear those relationships up and I finally really get how some family members relate to each other.

I think reading this book has also helped me identify some Middleton family traits in me: as well as the aforementioned love of the sensational, my fondness for an aperitif seems clearly to be inherited from Ginny and Dot, although I favour vermouth rather than their two glasses of port! 

Pigtails describes three periods in Simona's life: Christmas aged 12, Easter aged 15 and the summer holidays aged 18, each to be covered in a separate blog over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime I'm going to start on the next book: 60 miles from England, the account of the English community in Dieppe before Simona's time there. I'm hoping that I'll be encountering some of the characters from Pigtails again in their younger days and to find out more about not just the family, but also the others I have come to know over the past weeks. 

Pigtails and Pernod, Simona's memoir of her childhood holidays in Dieppe