Editor's blog September

Are your children more French or English? My daughter, who has lived here since she was nine years old, begged recently to go and stay with friends in England for a couple of weeks so she could spend a few days inside a British classroom: “I know I am English but sometimes it’s difficult to feel that I’m English” she said.

Indeed, it is said that you feel yourself to be the nationality of your secondary education. By this token many of our children will grow up to think of themselves as French rather than British. They may get French girlfriends and boyfriends and later spouses and within a generation their British roots will be no more than part of their French family history.
But many British teenagers in Normandy are planning to return to the UK for either jobs or higher education, so perhaps the secondary education formula only holds when you feel that the country of your secondary education is your home country.

The current wave of British incomers to France is unique in that we are neither traditional ex-pats - who tend to be posted abroad by employers and to send children either back to the UK for schooling or to a local “British” school. Ex-pat children rarely attend local schools.
But nor are we immigrants in the traditional sense of the word. We are neither refugees, from war or dictatorship, nor economic migrants in search of better paid jobs.

As quality-of-life-migrants or, to use a neat description I heard recently, “affordable space migrants”, we are happy to integrate but do not seek to assimilate - we don’t want French passports nor to call France our home country.

We fall somewhere between the ex-pat and immigrant stools and our children are both part of and apart from the host culture.

Like, say, immigrant Pakistani children in Britain who may be be western dressed and ballsy by day but retiring and subservient at home, our children are French by day and English at home.

Which will prove the more enduring may be hard to predict. I know a brother and sister, now in their late teens, who have lived in France since they were toddlers. Same family, same upbringing, yet the boy insists he is 100% English while his sister has applied for French nationality.

But while, as Lynn Maidment points out on P5, those parents who want to ensure that their French-domiciled children grow up comfortable with their own cultural references may need to make an extra effort to nurture their British roots, the dual culture experience is of course far from negative.

Children are highly adaptable creatures and, whether, ultimately, they see themselves as French or British, the ability to slip chameleon like between cultures is an extremely useful training for an adult life where the facility to get on with different peoples is a quality which may bring both personal and professional rewards.