I soon realized the extent to which England was a land of musicians and I came to understand that such brilliant bands as the Beatles had grown on fertile ground. Indeed, I found myself surrounded by young people most of whom had some musical skills. This had been very unusual among the French crowd I had left behind in Toulouse. Not surprising when you think that there was practically no music initiation taught in French schools; artistic skills being considered an extra, a cerise sur le gâteau that the French State did not feel bound to provide its children with. My boyfriend, Tony, was a good example of this plethora of talent. He was a guitar player who had taught himself to play and who seemed to have become something of a budding rock star. At least he and his friends firmly believed so. He could play and sing all the classics as well as, with his band, compose songs. They had jamming sessions until late at night and were even booked for some local events. Once they were invited to a music radio programme on a local radio station. My own knowledge of Anglo-saxon music, pop and rock, expounded no bounds. Rather like "La groupie du pianiste" in the famous song by Michel Berger, I turned into the groupie of the guitarist and just as the protagonist of that song, there really was nothing else that seemed worth doing in comparison. I did not see what else I could do to fill my life but eagerly attend all the musical activity and patiently wait for the end of the concerts to, at last, have the artist all to myself in the early hours of the morning.
On the one hand, it was exciting, especially since I was desperately in love with someone I considered a semi star but it was also depressing to feel I had no active part in the creative activity which was taking place around me. I soon realized that my relationship was not going to be with one man only but with an extended family of musicians. And I would never be one of them.
Caught as I was in the web of my new love life, I made the decision to postpone going back to France for a year, which at that age seemed like forever. At some point the decision was made that we, that is Tony and I, were going to share a house with other students. Not that I was very keen on the idea but I soon realized that I could not escape it. In Britain, already at that time, and contrary to the situation in France, where it was an unknown phenonomenon, house-sharing or flat-sharing was a popular way of getting cheap accommodation among students. As an excessively private young woman, I have to confess that I found the prospect daunting. To live with my lover was already a big step but to live with him and with others to boot was something I was anticipating with a degree of anxiety and even dread. And yet, I understood that there was no way I could avoid it; since I lived there, I had to adapt to their ways; when in Rome....and all that! And it did make sense financially speaking. We were students with no income other than scanty grants, small savings or the money earned doing odd jobs, thus it was a good idea to share resources. However, it was mainly a question of expectations; English students had been growing up looking forward to the day when they would at last leave home, become independent and have a whale of a time sharing a house with like-minded friends. This notion was totally connected to the whole university experience and seemed to me to be as important for them, if not more, than the studies themselves. It was expected to be a lot of fun. As for me, I didn't have those expectations. They are only beginning to appear in France now but were unheard of, then. Sharing a house with people who were not related to one in any way was still considered by most French young people as unpleasant if not altogether weird. There is no doubt that I would have much prefered it to be just the two of us. I had envisioned spending all our free time looking into each other's eyes adoringly but it was not to be. My boyfriend had other plans.
Therefore, as it was becoming obvious that I could not escape the house-sharing experience, I did my best to steer the decision of "who we were to share with" towards a manageable compromise. I wanted to prevent at all costs the presence of another woman in our house. The trust I had in my man was not so absolute that I wanted to test his resolve by jumping into a situation in which every morning or every night he would bump into another semi-naked female in our common bathroom. This was avoided in-extremis and we ended up sharing a two-bedroomed back-to-back house with Tony's best friend, guitar-playing Steve. I hasten to add that I had total confidence in my own ability to resist Steve's charms as I was not in the least attracted to him and could not figure out why so many people, including my own boyfriend Tony, were blabbing on about him being irresistible to the opposite sex.
