When I was a boy at the Lycée Français de Londres, I had two pin-ups: Bardot and Joan of Arc
When I was a little boy, living in London in the late 1950s, I was a pupil at the Lycée Français de Londres, the French day school in South Kensington. Except for the Algerian dates we were given as part of lunch on Wednesdays, I loved everything about my time at the Lycée. I particularly loved feeling totally French while knowing I was totally British. Because we were taught in French, we thought in French. In 1959, when I was 11, there were two girls about whom I thought constantly. 1959 was the year I began to keep a daily diary, a journal intime, and it’s embarrassingly full) of my fantasies about each of them. The first was Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, a patron saint of France, whom I fancied like nobody’s business – and whom, in my head, I married on 18th April 1959, the 50th...
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