One summer in France is a light-hearted, breezy memoir, which
will resonate with anyone who survived the 80s. Bev Spicer’s account of a 1979
summer spent with her friend Carol in France is littered with cultural
references such as pop music and the notoriously popular ‘Charlie’ perfume.
Spicer’s description of her university life in Keele will
strike a chord with those of us who have endured communal living. She humorously
depicts the mix of people you are likely to find yourself living amongst,
including the universally loathed obsessive food labeller.
The memoir is set at a time when the world was a more innocent,
less security conscious place and life moved at a slower pace. Education was
not only free but bursaries were being handed out like biscuits, hence the £350
that Bev is awarded for a so-called cultural experience in France. Spicer
captures the sheer joy, naiveté and arrogance that goes along with being twenty
but tempers it with the wry nod of her older self. It’s her a 80s adult voice
that acknowledges how lucky students of the 70s and 80s were in comparison to
now and we sense her adult dismay at the wild abandon with which the girls
travel helmetless and fearlessly on their hired mopeds.
Interrailing, for
lots of us in the 80s, was a rite of passage and Spicer perfectly evokes the
mood of that time when every European kid under the age of twenty five seemed
to be on the move. Her memoir is, for the most part, a series of encounters
that Bev and Carol have with different people such as the locals whose only
livelihood comes from tourism, parents who are desperate to offload their kids
onto the girls and the spectacular fifteen year old Swedish girl happily
travelling around Europe by herself. We see the cultural differences filtered through
the eyes of two middle-class students whose only agenda is to have a good time.
What comes across loud and clear is something that we probably already know but
is always pleasing to revisit and that’s the fact that people are generally
good and decent wherever in the world you happen to go.
What I particularly enjoyed about the memoir is the
relationship between Carol and Bev. The girls are very different; Carol is loud
and confident whereas Bev fancies herself as a bit of an intellectual, taking
great pains to let the people around her know she is reading the likes of
Moliere or Baudelaire. The story though, at its heart, is a celebration of
friendship and the kind of intense friendship that is unique to young women.
If you are looking for a light read that will take you down
memory lane and have you chuckling at Bev and Carol’s adventures then this is
the book for you.
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