Dejardin Kathleen. Cross Channel Cultural Identity. Analysis of correspondence in late between a young Englishwoman recently installed on a housing estate built for Renault workers fifty kilometres from Paris and her mother in a residential Northern suburb of Birmingham.
At that time the consumer society had become normal in the United Kingdom but had little foothold in France. Having come into possession of a chestful of letters exchanged between a young Englishwoman living in France and her mother in England, we felt it might be of interest to quote extracts from the first four months of this correspondence, that is to say from the beginning of July to the end of October the same year. Letters, of course, are not statistics nor are they written for general consumption.
In this particular case they are not the outpourings of an unhappy soul β one does not run to mother for comfort when one is oneself a mother. There is also a certain presentation, a propaganda element to defend the choice of having married a foreigner, and a Frenchman to boot. Nevertheless one can discern a certain relief in the writer who, through the letters, is able to unburden a considerable irritation to a compatriot whom she is at the same time trying to entertain and this in itself is also a way of buying her pardon for having deserted her native land.
The mother observes the same reserve. Since her daughter has made the choice of marrying a Frenchman who is also penniless and a Roman Catholic however nominal , she makes an effort, both determined and instinctive, to make things work. Neither is ignorant of things French and both could be described as francophiles until this episode in an HLM housing estate in the Β«Parisian desert Β». That is to say that the writter was of the third generation to travel abroad and both her mother and grandmother had been as far as America.
Her daughter had hitch-hiked and walked across France in , finding friendship and hospitality. This could not have been enough to provoke her remark at the beginning of the war that Β«It is a pity we are not fighting the French Β». The inhabitants were mostly young couples with several children who had emigrated from the Sarthe to work in the Renault factory at Flins.
