The Normandy House

Having had an adventurous father constantly uprooting his family and then a sportswriter husband often away, the author, an Australian living in Paris, dreams of owning a country house that will be hers forever. On a visit to Deauville she follows the loops of the Seine and is enchanted by the Normandy landscape - its small green fields with black and white or caramel cows grazing under apple blossom, its tipsy half timbered houses cradled in the crooks of hills or buried in riotous flowers. They sing to her like sirens. She has to have one. With a small inheritance she buys a derelict four-hundred-year old cottage near Honfleur and sets to work, braving wily estate agents, terrifying power tools and alarming events. Her neighbors encourage her with their gifts of freshly gathered vegetables, trout from a nearby stream and warm brown eggs. Friends and family come to help her and Gaston the mason creates magnificent floors and a terrace from antique tiles and rustic bricks. Gradually the hovel becomes a haven, the wasteland around it a beautiful garden and Normandy the country of her heart. She revels in its restaurants and street markets and steeps herself in its history and culture. Towns and villages in every corner of the region turn out to be the homes of painters and writers past and present. The works of Monet and Turner, Flaubert and Maupassant come to life. Coastal towns host anniversaries of the D-day landings. The book spans the 50th and the 60th. Spry American veterans fill the roads with vintage jeeps, motorbikes with sidecars and trucks called Caroline and Mabel. Local people tell anecdotes of this last truly heroic battle, embedding its story in the region for eternity. But heroism in Normandy has many faces. Not far from the author's house are a group of historic hamlets known as "Heroine's Corner", the birthplace of three famous women - a cheese maker, a prostitute and a murderess - proof that whatever you do, if you put your mind to it and do your best, you can be a heroine.