Second home and citizenship [Previous ¦ Next]
Mum and Dad and I returned to Pau in southwestern France at the end of an expat cycle, and now we were able to gain French citizenship (our first opportunity was in Algiers when everyone knew he'd be conscripted if naturalised, and our second opportunity was in Brisbane that had no French consulate or embassy, so our application for naturalisation got delayed over a decade). Interestingly enough, only two countries did not let us in with out titre de voyage, travel document, in all our worldly travels until then... by which time I had been around the world twice at age ten! My parents bought an apartment and finally decided that France was it. My Mum having had a hemorrhage after my birth, had not been able to conceive since, but new treatments allowed her to have my sister and brother 18 months apart, over a dozen years after me. Her body took it hard however at age 40 as she was never strong physically, and was ridden by depression as we would learn later. So I ended up raising my siblings as a teen, which proved a disaster for me and an effective psychological contraceptive for my next 25 years...
I worked hard and well through school, and life was good next to the Pyrénées mountains, where Dad bought a condo and I skied and hiked a lot. Also renewed my love affair with horse and pet, in a town with long-standing British traditions (Pau boasted golf-course, casino and horseback riding facilities since the early XIX c., when Wellington fell in love with the place upon returning from a Spanish military campaign). My parents' efforts that I keep up my English also helped me maintain an English-French duality that would become critical later on.
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