Romance: Katie Fforde v. Trisha Ashley

In her new book, out in February, Katie Fforde moves away from cosy British villages to France in the 1960s. Arabella, Annabelle, Artemis - no, her name is Alexandra, is a twenty-year-old orphan who has been left to the mercy of rather vaguely described ‘relations’. Their idea of bringing her up was to send her to boarding school and provide her with a series of governesses or companions. She is living happily in the family home in Belgravia (!) with two girlfriends, while upstairs are David and a couple of his friends. When ‘my relations’ discover that she is apparently sharing the house with a man (gay and lovely), they decide to pack her off to a finishing school in Switzerland. Isn’t she rather old for that? En route, she stops off in Paris, meets a young married woman with whom she strikes up an immediate friendship and in no time is applying for a job with a friend of the friend. What she doesn’t know is that the job is in Provence and her employer a French Comte.

Arriving at the château, she finds three hostile children who say they don’t need a nanny, a vanished housekeeper and nothing to eat but stale bread and cheese. Is she downhearted? Of course not. In no time she has won over the children and is preparing meals. Finding that they don’t go to school and that the youngest can’t even read, she sends for David to tutor them in English and his friend Jack to teach music and maths. David is a wonderful cook and they soon form a happy little household. (These people who love to cook enormous meals for large numbers of people always seem to me the most fantastic element in romantic fantasy. I suppose they do exist.) Papa is often away (and hasn’t he been rather seriously neglecting his children?) but when he arrives, oh dear. Alexandra falls madly in love with him and spends the rest of the book arguing with herself that he’s her employer, he’s too old for her, he has a terrible ex-wife and so on. Did I mention that Alexandra is beautiful and also an heiress? ‘My relations’ pay a flying visit in a Rolls to check up on just what she’s doing and inform the Comte that Alexandra doesn’t come into her fortune until she’s twenty-five, just in case he should be a fortune hunter.

Of course, one gobbles up all the French atmosphere, the château, the delightful characters and the one to hate but the ending is obvious from the moment Alexandra is offered the job in Paris. I can’t understand why the book was set in the sixties; it’s not as if anyone meets Mick Jagger in the local market. Apart from the clothes, I can’t see anything sixties about the way of life. It is, nevertheless, great fun. I read it thanks to NetGalley.
( Trisha Ashley )